Hi! I’m Karen Rustad, long-time OpenHatch contributor and current board member. On Wednesday, I was part of a panel organized by PyLadies called, “Learn to contribute to Open Source“! Also, if you’re in the SF area this weekend, you should join me at the Django sprint co-hosted by PyLadies and the Django Meetup on Saturday! We’ll be primarily be focusing on improving the Django tutorial and docs, but feel free to work on anything Django there!

It was great to speak alongside Jeremy Dunck and Alex Gaynor, both longtime Django committers. Alex helped OpenHatch organize an Open Source Comes to Campus event at his alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy, NY. Jeremy was active in the Greasemonkey project since close to the beginning. I had the chance to share my experiences as a more recent member of the open source contributor world.

You can read more about the event. Attendees seemed to like it:

Thoroughly comprehensible discussion. Appreciate hearing details from live humans instead of causing unintentional offense on IRC with my tedious frequently asked question. Great food!

It was a lot more free-form than I had expected, which made for a lot of fun conversation, and after I was done rambling the event organizers and I helped some attendees prepare for the weekend sprint by setting up and using IRC on their computers for the first time. Thanks to Lynn Root and Jeremy for co-organizing it!

It’s probably worth noting that the Django sprint on Saturday that this meetup was prelude to was apparently inspired by the talk I gave at PyCon this year. Quite an honor, if kind of befuddling, to be taken so seriously by the Django project! I’m excited to see what old tutorial playtesting results, new tutorial innovations, and other improvements to Django’s docs and code people come up with this weekend.